When Genius Fails

And I changed my focus again...

iLiterature: Incorporating Hypertext Fiction Into Critical Academic Study

For over 10 years, e-readers only imitated the experience of reading conventional print. In a rapid eight-month time period, starting in November 2009, the e-book industry saw the release of three mainstream readers that broke the confines of the printed book: Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Apple’s iPad, and Amazon’s Kindle 3. Because of their WiFi capabilities, this new generation of e-readers have the potential to bring hypertext literature into the mainstream.

Academic writing has both hailed and condemned e-book technology. However, it is only through e-readers and computers that hypertext literature can be read due to hyperlink technology that produces reader interaction and creates a non-linear style distinctive of this medium. Thus far, the scholarly approaches to hypertext literature predominantly focus on the changing relationship between author and reader, and on whether or not the experience of hypertext literature alters reader subjectivity. This paper breaks from the current scholarship by presenting and addressing the issues surrounding the critical study of hypertext literature, alone or in relation to other hypertext or conventional literature.

In order to critically engage with hypertext literature in the manner currently the custom in Literary Studies, the readers’ experience with the work must first be homogenized. This tactic, however, is in complete contrast to the very concept of hypertext literature and the author’s choice to write in this medium. To bring this fiction fully into the academic canon a more standardized reading must be available. Currently, discussions about a work of hypertext fiction revolve around the author’s writing style, which does not provide a complete literary analysis. Criticisms of hypertext fiction need to be expanded to include more areas of analysis. For example, when studying areas such as plot and character development, the path, or paths, taken by the critic through the hypertext material must be communicated to others.

In this paper I suggest different methods to communicate paths through hypertexts so that readers can understand, and if desired, follow the narrative experienced by the critic. These tools must be developed to guide readers through the text in the same manner that the critic of the work has chosen to discuss. This paper also presents various types of technology that can be used to save a specific hypertext sequence so that it can be experienced again, or by others, in the same way.

This emphasis on consistency does not imply that critics should only study hypertext literature in the exact same fashion as other literature. A piece of hypertext fiction still needs to be explored as fully as possible by critics following and mapping various routes through the work. This means that a piece of hypertext literature could possibly be analyzed against itself. Although the medium presents many opportunities to consider text in new ways there are some serious challenges which must be addressed before this genre can be fully integrated into academic literary study.